Get your site some "Link Bait"

Here’s an interesting idea from Bill Hartzer at www.searchengineguide.com on Link Bait although he originally read about it at www.seobook.com. Link bait is particularly useful if like many of our clients you are in a competitive field and you are finding it difficult to build links naturally. What really is link bait? It's something on your web site that causes someone to link to you. Although I hate to promote Burger Kink on this blog check out www.subservientchicken.com which was so popular that it got 24,000 links and ranked 1# on Google for the term "chicken". Other examples include the case of an employee of a high tech company with lots of competition. Ring any bells? Andrew took his digital camera to an industry convention where he took photos of many of the attendees, the booths, and some of the after-hours events. Although there may be some privacy issues here he posted the photos on his web site, sent out a few emails to his colleagues and other industry insiders he met at the convention. Before he knew it, most of Andrew's competitors were linking to his web site and the photos he took.

We've even got some advice and more examples on the subject of link bait from Matt Cutts at Google so we'll be definitely brainstorming some link bait ideas over the next couple of weeks to see if we can come up with some ideas of our own.

www.ju2.com
http://ju2ltd.blogspot.com

Rumours of Google PR Update

Keeping an eye on the blogosphere today I have picked up rumours that Google has updated the backlinks for numerous sites. Apparently there was definitely an update this week which makes it around 95 days since Google did their last PR update. The longest wait for a Google Page Rank update was 111 days. It seems that Goggles has also started indexing and de-indexing sites which means that in the next couple of days we expect to see changes in Google ranks for our client sites.

www.ju2.com
www,ju2ltd.blogosphere.com

RSS Specifications

Whilst submitting the JU2 Web strategy Blog to long list of RSS and blog directories I discovered www.rss-specifications.com which contains enormous amounts of information on RSS and its history. To quote from the homepage "This site is a comprehensive rss reference detailing everything you need to know about RSS." More importantly for me it contains a comprehensive list of directroies where you can submit you feed with direct links to the submission pages. This is good as some submission links are purposely difficult to find to discourage spamming. - but you can find them all here. Haven't had chance to read everything on the site because there is just so much. But it seems to be great for an introduction to subject or more detailed research and who knows it may help you to take the next step and get blogging.

Check Spellings

Use this tool to quickly check the spelling on your webpages.

Blogs SEO and RSS Directories

The guys at v9designbuild.com posted this article reporting on how they had incorporated a blog into clients website. In the article they point out that the days of of reciprocals links, unless of specific benefit, are now gone - thankfully.

To increase link popularity v9designbuild.com installed WordPress as a seamless addition to their clients website, filled it with highly relevant copy, with Technorati trackbacks, registered all of its pages with Google Sitemap and submitted to a hundred or more news aggregators. Blogs now dominate the referrers list and traffic has quadrupled in a couple of months.

The point to all this is that blogs, newsfeeds and forums are increasingly becoming one of the most important strategies in Internet marketing. and one that www.ju2.com will be actively encouraging our clients to use. For a list of places to submit your feed take a look at this post.

Tracking Blog Backlinks

If you're putting a lot of effort into blogs as part of your SEO strategy then it wouyld interesting to know how many blogs link to your URL. This can be down on Technocrati using their Search URL function but I saw this blog this morning which contains a handy little tool. drag the TT link to your toolbar, then click while visiting a blog article to see Technorati's roundup of posts commenting on the article.